There’s no doubt, as far as email options go, Gmail is one of the services that really does a lot to boost your Chrome productivity. Whether it’s through the creative use of labels or Gmail filters5 Gmail Filters to Help Prioritize & Organize Your Inbox5 Gmail Filters to Help Prioritize & Organize Your InboxWhat filters should each and every person have in their arsenal so that their inbox is as orderly as mine? I'm here to help you get started in setting up your first five filters, or...Read More, canned responses, and more, Gmail lends itself to a more productive email experience. While Google has certainly put a lot of thought into the product, providing a lot of handy features and settings, which you can learn more about in our detailed Gmail Guide for power users. However, there are a few Chrome extensions out there that can make the Google experience even better.

One of the main ways in which we lose time when sorting through our emails is downloading and uploading attachments. We’ve put together a list of the 4 best Chrome extensions which address this problem – making it easier to access, save and upload attachments – as well as one more extensions which makes it easier to reply to several emails with a simple click of the button.

While Gmail gives users a way to send canned responsesEmail Faster & Better With Canned ResponsesEmail Faster & Better With Canned ResponsesDon’t have time to cook lunch? No problem, grab a can. Need some camping chow that won’t go bad? Easy, get some canned food. Tired of typing the same email replies? Try canned emails! Think...Read More for those tedious emails in which you say the same thing over and over again, they don’t really give you a way to send replies all in one go. With the Chrome extension Batch Reply for Gmail that’s exactly what you can do. Now, of course, using an extension like this means that you can’t personalize the emails that you’re sending, but sometimes you can sacrifice personalization in favor of productivity.

That said, Batch Reply is not perfect. It acts more as a compose button, but one that automatically populates your email with all the addresses you want to send emails to, listing them all in the ‘To:” bar. In essence, it works as a quick way to create an email blast (and you can easily just cut and paste the addresses from the “To:” bar to the BCC bar). Batch Reply gives users an interesting way of accessing your contacts – almost doing away with the need for a contact list if you’re constantly sending emails to people you’ve received emails from.

Cloudy is a great extension that really boosts your productivity by cutting out two extra steps – downloading the file from the cloud, and then attaching it to your email.This way, it all happens with just one easy step. If you have a particularly slow Internet connection, access to a Chrome extension like Cloudy can save you time, and probably quite a bit of frustration as well.

If you’re looking for the reverse – an easy way to save attachments straight from your email account to your cloud-based accounts, Gmail Attachments to Drive will save your attachments to your Google Drive account. After installing the extension, all attachments, whether documents, images, zip files or more, will have a ‘Save to Drive‘ link next to them, making it easy to transfer the file from your email to the cloud, without having to download them to your computer first.

Again, for those of you suffering from lagging Internet connections – this will certainly cut into the amount of time that you have to spend getting your attachments from one cloud-based service to another.

Attachments.me

Another handy service for getting more productive with your Gmail attachments is Attachments.meLiberate Your Gmail Inbox Attachments With Attachments.meLiberate Your Gmail Inbox Attachments With Attachments.meHave you ever received an email from your boss, family member, friend or some other connection with an attachment in it, then saved that email because you wanted to access the attachment later? You probably...Read More. It allows you to attach files directly from the cloud, much like Cloudy, while also making it easy to save files directly to the cloud as well. If you’d rather use just one service than two, then Attachments.me is definitely for you. Another bonus to using Attachments.me, is that you’ll be able to search your attachments, away from your inbox, in a much more user friendly manner.

Attachments.me allows you to save your attachments to Dropbox, Google Drive or Box, and by the same token, it makes it possible to attach files directly in your Gmail inbox from these three services.

Can you think of any Chrome productivity extensions that can make Gmail even more productive? Let us know in the comments.

Here's a simple free Chrome extension for Gmail that makes a lot of sense. It's called "Actions for Gmail" - it just adds an "archive" or "delete" button to each message in your inbox. Install it from the Chrome Webstore: http://goo.gl/uksAQ.

Nancy is a writer, photographer and editor, living in the DC area with her husband, their greyhound Ella, and Italian greyhound Oliver. Follow here on her personal blog , on Twitter , Pinterest, and Instagram